Folk Theories of Online Dating: Exploring People’s Beliefs About the Online Dating Process and Online Dating Algorithms

Abstract

How do online daters come to understand and make sense of their online dating experiences and the algorithms that underlie online dating platforms? Across two mixed-method studies, we take a metaphoric approach to identify and explore people’s folk theories about traditional dating, online dating, and online dating algorithms. In Study 1, we take a quantitative approach and use an innovative wiki-survey procedure to identify individuals’ folk theories of online dating and their associated themes through content analyses. In Study 2, we take a qualitative approach, exploring participants’ folk theories through in-depth interviews, extended case method, and grounded theory. Our studies uncovered two folk theories unique to traditional dating ( movies, nurturing ), one folk theory unique to online dating ( game ), three folk theories related to online dating algorithms ( filter, personalized advertisements, bracket ), and two folk theories that were found to overlap between traditional and online dating ( shopping, chance and randomness ). Our findings provide novel insights into how daters make sense of traditional and online relationship development processes as well as the algorithms that underlie online dating platforms.